“You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”
~ Romans 2:1
“For this is what the high and lofty One says . . . ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’ ”
~ Isaiah 57:15
The Stranger is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1942. Camus’s first novel, it is perhaps his best-known work, and a key text of 20th-century philosophy. It is also a perennial favorite among freshman college English teachers. It is an example of existentialism, an aberrant and very appealing worldview that emphasizes the subjective.
The protagonist is Meursault, a French man (characterized by being largely emotionally detached, innately stoic, and iconic, who irrationally murders an Arab man whom he recognizes in French Algiers. The story is divided into parts one and two: Meursault’s first-person narrative view before and after the murder.
Meursault lives completely in the present. As an existentialist, he has no reason to regret what he does because it is done; regret is redundant. It is a dishonest emotion. In this state of mind, Meursault lives fully in the present: he feels joy and frustration like every other human; he has a soul in that he is reflective about metaphysical, abstract reality. The difference is that his feelings are sensual; they are experienced and explained through his senses. In prison, while awaiting the execution of his death sentence by the guillotine, Meursault meets with a chaplain, but rejects his proffered opportunity of turning to God, explaining that God is a waste of his time. Although the chaplain persists in attempting to lead Meursault from his atheism, Meursault finally attacks him in a rage.
Meursault ultimately grasps the universe’s indifference toward humankind (coming to terms with his execution):
As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.1
Thematically, the absurd overrides responsibility; the notion of taking “responsibility” for one’s acts is irrelevant. In fact, much like Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage, despite his physical terror, Meursault is satisfied with his death; his discrete sensory perceptions only physically affect him, and thus are relevant to his being. Death gives Meursault revelation and happiness in the passive indifference of the world. To the existentialist, this is a sort of “peace.” Central to that happiness is his pausing after the first, fatal gunshot when killing the Arab man. Interviewed by the magistrate, he mentions it did not matter that he paused and then shot four more times. Meursault is objective, there was no resultant, tangible difference: the Arab man died of one gunshot, and four more gunshots did not render him “more dead.”
The absurdity is in society’s creating a justice system to give meaning to his action via capital punishment: The fact that the death sentence had been read at eight o’clock at night and not at five o’clock . . . the fact that it had been handed down in the name of some vague notion called the French (or German, or Chinese) people — all of it seemed to detract from the seriousness of the decision.
Do you see why this book is so appealing and yet so dangerous? It places humankind at the center of the story, at the center of the universe. Sensory reality is holy empiricism, but without so much as a nod to the “gods” (as the empiricist Aristotle does). Existentialists invite humankind to embrace a rabid narcicism that is at once facile and deductive.
Nothing — nothing! — is meaningless. God has planned everything. He is in absolute control and everything He does is altogether good.
As if that blind rage has washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, I that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much life myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.2
Word Problems
What rate of interest is implied in an offer to sell a house for $2,700 cash, or in annual installments each of $1,000 payable 1, 2, and 3 years from date?
Hint: The amount of $2,700 with interest for 3 years should be equal to the sum of the first payment with interest for 2 years, the amount of the second payment with interest for 1 year, and the third payment. Hence if r is the rate of interest and we write x for 1 + r, we have
2,700 x 3 = 1,000 x 2 + 1,000 x + 1,000.
Find the rate of interest implied in an offer to sell a house for $3,500 cash, or in annual installments each of $1,000 payable 1, 2, 3, and 4 years from date.
Find the rate of interest implied in an offer to sell a house for $3,500 cash, or $4,000 payable in annual installments each of $1,000, the first payable now.
Insight
The Writing Section Essay
Bring something new or unique to the essay.
Remember that the graders are reading hundreds, maybe thousands of these on the same topic. So use an example or story that will make your essay memorable.
Grab their attention.
You have to count on the first few sentences to make the grader want to read more. You have about 15 seconds to persuade the grader to give you a 6 — which he will only do if he reads the whole thing carefully — instead of a safe 3 — which he will do if he doesn’t like the beginning and he skims the essay.
Narrow your focus.
Your essay should prove a single point, allowing the reader to find the main idea and follow it from beginning to end.
More is always better.
While you want your syntax to be precise and cogent, the essay itself needs to fill the pages you are given!
Don’t forget to proofread.
Spelling and grammatical errors can be interpreted as careless or bad writing. Don’t rely on your computer’s spell check — it has a way of making the odd correction go astray.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow3
Washington Irving
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by New Yorker Washington Irving, is one of the most enduring and memorable short novels in American literary history. The inimical Ichabod Crane rides across the dark nights of all our imaginations.
Suggested Vocabulary Words
In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried,” in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.
His schoolhouse was a low building of one large room, rudely constructed of logs; the windows partly glazed, and partly patched with leaves of old copybooks. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant hours, by a withe twisted in the handle of the door, and stakes set against the window shutters; so that though a thief might get in with perfect ease, he would find some embarrassment in getting out — an idea most probably borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mystery of an eelpot.
The schoolhouse stood in a rather lonely but pleasant situation, just at the foot of a woody hill, with a brook running close by, and a formidable birch-tree growing at one end of it. From hence the low murmur of his pupils’ voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard in a drowsy summer’s day, like the hum of a beehive; interrupted now and then by the authoritative voice of the master, in the tone of menace or command, or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch, as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. Truth to say, he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Ichabod Crane’s scholars certainly were not spoiled.
I would not have it imagined, however, that he was one of those cruel potentates of the school who joy in the smart of their subjects; on the contrary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity; taking the burden off the backs of the weak, and laying it on those of the strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice were satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little tough wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. All this he called “doing his duty by their parents”; and he never inflicted a chastisement without following it by the assurance, so consolatory to the smarting urchin, that “he would remember it and thank him for it the longest day he had to live.”
To the untrained eye, the stars and the planets are not distinguishable. It is customary to call them all alike “stars.” But since the planets more or less rapidly change their places in the sky, in consequence of their revolution about the sun, while the stars proper seem to remain always in the same relative positions, the latter are spoken of as “fixed stars.” In the beginnings of astronomy it was not known that the “fixed stars” had any motion independent of their apparent annual revolution with the whole sky about the earth as a seeming center. Now, however, we know that the term “fixed stars” is paradoxical, for there is not a single really fixed object in the whole celestial sphere. The apparent fixity in the positions of the stars is due to their immense distance, combined with the shortness of the time during which we are able to observe them. It is like viewing the plume of smoke issuing from a steamer, hull down, at sea: if one does not continue to watch it for a long time it appears to be motionless, although in reality it may be traveling at great speed across the line of sight. Even the planets seem fixed in position if one watches them for a single night only, and the more distant ones do not sensibly change their places, except after many nights of observation. Neptune, for instance, moves but little more than two degrees in the course of an entire year, and in a month its change of place is only about one-third of the diameter of the full moon.
Yet, fixed as they seem, the stars are actually moving with a speed in comparison with which, in some cases, the planets might almost be said to stand fast in their tracks. Jupiter’s speed in his orbit is about eight miles per second, Neptune’s is less than three and one-half miles, and the earth’s is about eighteen and one-half miles; while there are “fixed stars” which move two hundred or three hundred miles per second. They do not all, however, move with so great a velocity, for some appear to travel no faster than the planets. But in all cases, notwithstanding their real speed, long-continued and exceedingly careful observations are required to demonstrate that they are moving at all. No more overwhelming impression of the frightful depths of space in which the stars are buried can be obtained than by reflecting upon the fact that a star whose actual motion across the line of sight amounts to two hundred miles per second does not change its apparent place in the sky, in the course of a thousand years, sufficiently to be noticed by the casual observer of the heavens!
There is one vast difference between the motions of the stars and those of the planets to which attention should be at once called: the planets, being under the control of a central force emanating from their immediate master, the sun, all move in the same direction and in orbits concentric about the sun; the stars, on the other hand, move in every conceivable direction and have no apparent center of motion, for all efforts to discover such a center have failed. At one time, when theology had finally to accept the facts of science, a grandiose conception arose in some pious minds, according to which the Throne of God was situated at the exact center of His Creation, and, seated there, He watched the magnificent spectacle of the starry systems obediently revolving around Him. Astronomical discoveries and speculations seemed for a time to afford some warrant for this view, which was, moreover, an acceptable substitute for the abandoned geocentric theory in minds that could only conceive of God as a superhuman artificer, constantly admiring his own work. No longer ago than the middle of the nineteenth century a German astronomer, Maedler, believed that he had actually found the location of the center about which the stellar universe revolved. He placed it in the group of the Pleiades, and upon his authority an extraordinary imaginative picture was sometimes drawn of the star Alcyone, the brightest of the Pleiades, as the very seat of the Almighty. This idea even seemed to gain a kind of traditional support from the mystic significance, without known historical origin, which has for many ages, and among widely separated peoples, been attached to the remarkable group of which Alcyone is the chief. But since Maedler’s time it has been demonstrated that the Pleiades cannot be the center of revolution of the universe, and, as already remarked, all attempts to find or fix such a center have proved abortive. Yet so powerful was the hold that the theory took upon the popular imagination, that even today astronomers are often asked if Alcyone is not the probable site of “Jerusalem the Golden.”
If there were a discoverable center of predominant gravitative power, to which the motions of all the stars could be referred, those motions would appear less mysterious, and we should then be able to conclude that the universe was, as a whole, a prototype of the subsidiary systems of which it is composed. We should look simply to the law of gravitation for an explanation, and, naturally, the center would be placed within the opening enclosed by the Milky Way. If it were there the Milky Way itself should exhibit signs of revolution about it, like a wheel turning upon its hub. No theory of the star motions as a whole could stand which failed to take account of the Milky Way as the basis of all. But the very form of that divided wreath of stars forbids the assumption of its revolution about a center. Even if it could be conceived as a wheel having no material center it would not have the form which it actually presents. As was shown in Chapter 2, there is abundant evidence of motion in the Milky Way; but it is not motion of the system as a whole, but motion affecting its separate parts. Instead of all moving one way, the galactic stars, as far as their movements can be inferred, are governed by local influences and conditions. They appear to travel crosswise and in contrary directions, and perhaps they eddy around foci where great numbers have assembled; but of a universal revolution involving the entire mass we have no evidence. 4Curiosities of the Sky
The chief purpose of this essay is:
- to examine stars and planets
- to explore the causes of sun spots
- to compare and contrast the apparent motion of planets and stars
- none
Drawing Conclusions
Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it is not to be wondered at that so tempting a morsel soon found favor in his eyes, more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion. Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those everything was snug, happy, and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance, rather than the style in which he lived. His stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm tree spread its broad branches over it, at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well formed of a barrel; and then stole sparkling away through the grass, to a neighboring brook, that babbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farmhouse was a vast barn, that might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm; the flail was busily resounding within it from morning to night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens, from whence sallied forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air.
A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farmyard, and Guinea fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish, discontented cry. Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished wings and crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart — sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered.
What is true about this character?
- Crane is an outgoing, popular man.
- Crane is a hardworking man.
- Crane is a good teacher.
- Crane is a reticent, private person.
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- None
- All
- I and IV
- II and IV
Writing Style
Which part of the sentence below is wrong?
It cannot be doubted (A) that the minds of a vast number of men would be left poor shrunken things, soldiers and the like, if (B) there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, false valuations, imaginations as one (C) would, and the (D) like.
Correct Sentences
(A) On one occasion, I heard someone say “he is bigger than(B) him.”
(A) Sometimes it is hard to recognize (B) who is having the better time, (C) him or me.
(A) I could hear (B) them speaking (C) to he and to she.
Elaboration — Effective writers include information in their arguments that support their main ideas. This is called elaboration. Elaboration includes facts, statistic, sensory details, anecdotes, examples, and quotes. Methods of elaboration include questioning, exploring, and research.
Go to Answers Sheet